roger moseley

 

MUSIC HISTORY AND LUDOMUSICOLOGY



  1. •My PhD thesis, which I completed at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, is entitled Brief Immortality: Recasting History in the Music of Brahms. I am currently preparing two articles about Brahms and the course of musical thought and performance in nineteenth-century Austria and Germany.

  2. •My other main research interest is ludomusicology, which involves 1) the study of music and video games and 2) the study of play as a mode for approaching a diverse range of musical practices and repertoires.

  3. •I am working on a book about performance and reproductive technologies from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Its tentative title is Ludomusicology: Performance, Technology, and Recreation from Mozart to Miyamoto.

  4. •In 2011, I presented a paper entitled “Ludomusicality: or, Mozart and the Tetris effect” at the University of California, Berkeley, the Eastman School of Music, Cornell University, and as the keynote address at Sound at Play, Columbia University’s Music Scholarship Conference.

  5. •In 2008-11, I presented papers and pre-concert talks at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, the Royal Festival Hall, London, the University of Oxford, New York University, the University of Virginia, and the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology. I also took part in a panel addressing the future of Brahms research at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Nashville.

Born in London, raised in Newcastle, educated in Oxford, Berkeley, and London, I am currently an assistant professor in music history and theory at Cornell University. For the academic year 2011-12, I am a Faculty Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. You can download my CV here.


MUSIC HISTORIAN • LUDOMUSICOLOGIST

HISTORICALLY INSPIRED IMPROVISER • COLLABORATIVE PIANIST

HISTORICALLY INSPIRED IMPROVISATION


  1. •In 2012, I will be co-organizer (with Annette Richards) of Improvisation in Theory and Practice, a working group co-sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

  2. •At the University of Chicago, I facilitated a workshop in Historically Inspired Musical Improvisation. I was also Musical Director of Impromptu, a performance ensemble drawn from the workshop’s members. Our last project was an improvised staged reconstruction of Mozart’s Musik zu einer Faschingspantomime, K. 446 (416d), which we performed at the Chicago Humanities Festival and the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Philadelphia.

  3. • While in Chicago, I improvised an 18th-century-style sonata movement and a sarabande during concerts with the Juliani Ensemble at the Chicago Cultural Center.

  4. •I studied improvisation and interpretation with David Dolan at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

  5. •In May 2007, I performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E flat, K. 449, with improvised cadenzas and embellishments. Click here to download a full recording, and here to listen to an excerpt of my improvised cadenza to the first movement and an interview broadcast on Classic FM in June 2007 in which David Dolan and I discuss the issues behind improvising when performing Mozart.

  6. •In 2012, I will be

  7. •In July 2007, violinist Laura Colgate and I performed two Mozart sonatas for piano and violin (in G, K. 301, and B flat, K. 454) with improvised Eingänge and ornaments as part of the Mostly Mozart festival in the main hall of the Barbican Centre, London.

COLLABORATIVE

PIANISM




  1. •I am a member of the Juliani ensemble, a Chicago-based chamber group established by Emily Seaberry-Graef that features members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

  2. •Recent performances at the University of Chicago include Schumann’s Dichterliebe, a four-hand piano recital with Thomas Christensen, violin sonatas by Beethoven, Fauré, and Brahms with Adam Liebert, and Mendelssohn’s C-minor Piano Trio, op. 66, with Adam and cellist Ian Maksin. Adam and I also gave a recital at Grand Valley State University.

  3. •Recent concerto performances include Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor, K. 491, and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4, op. 58, with the Oxford Sinfonia Eroica conducted by Samuel Draper.

  4. •In 2007, I was awarded an MMus with Distinction in collaborative piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where I studied with Graham Johnson and Ronan O’Hora. During my studies, I performed Debussy songs at LSO St. Luke’s, introduced and played a recital of Fauré and Debussy songs as part of the City of London Festival, performed Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson at St. Martin in the Fields, played Brahms’s F-major Sonata for Piano and Cello, op. 99, and Debussy’s Cello Sonata at St. James’s Piccadilly, and performed Mendelssohn’s C-minor Piano Trio in Oxford and London.

  5. •In July 2007, I was resident pianist for the vocal summer course at the Académie Internationale d’Eté de Nice led by Robin Bowman, Head of Vocal Studies at the GSMD. In the same month, I took part in a  City of London Festival masterclass given by baritone François Le Roux, as noted by musicalpointers.co.uk.